Power consumption is a growing problem for today's servers. It is desirable to reduce the power consumption of a server to as low a level as possible, while maintaining maximum performance. In addition to saving on electricity costs, which for a large server farm could be considerable, another desirable result of reducing the power consumption by a server is that less internal heat will be generated. Greater heat reduces a server's reliability and increases its total cost of ownership since higher operating temperatures places more stress on internal circuitry such as microprocessors, internal memory chips, and also any integrated peripherals such as internal disk drives, cooling fans, or circuit boards.
Current computer processors contain logic to lower clock speed and thus power consumption on demand. One attempt at solving the power consumption problem is to have an administrator of the servers configure the processor offline for the desired power state. Offline configuration is simple but not desirable for a server as it requires the server to be taken out of use temporarily.